[Election-Methods] Dopp: 6. “Makes post election data and exit poll analysis much more difficult to perform”

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

>6. Dopp: “Makes post election data and exit poll 
>analysis much more difficult to perform
”
>
>To date, IRV election can make it easier to do 
>post-election and exit poll analysis. Because 
>optical scan counts with IRV require capturing 
>of ballot images, San Francisco (CA) and 
>Burlington (VT) were able to release the data 
>files showing every single ballot's set of 
>rankings – thereby allowing any voter to do a 
>recount and full analysis on their own.
>
>Exit polls can be done just as well under IRV 
>rules as vote-for-one rules. California requires 
>a manual audit in its elections, which has been 
>done without difficulty in San Francisco’s IRV 
>elections. Manual audits should be required for 
>all elections, regardless of whether IRV is used or not.

This is stuff and nonsense. As I just pointed out 
in the last post, the Opscan machines in San 
Francisco do *not* provide images of the ballots, 
they are preprocessed and modified, they do not 
show all rankings on the ballot. I've proposed 
that genuine images be made available. It's a lot 
of data, but not nearly as much as might be 
thought. A fax-quality image of a ballot might 
be, say, 10KB, compressed. So with a million 
voters, we'd be looking at 10 GB of data for the 
whole election. The images could be captured with 
digital cameras, independently, by election 
observers, so there could be multiple redundant 
collections of ballot images. I'm pretty sure 
that media would take those images and do their 
own automatic image recognition on them, but if 
the ballots were serialized in some way (and they 
must be for the promise of being able to verify 
the images with the paper ballots), voters could 
look at a tolerable number of images and verify 
that their tabulation of the votes in those 
images matched the ones in an official count or 
what other voters have tabulated. But that's not 
what we have. Nor do I expect that we will get it 
from government. We'll have to do it ourselves. 
In Florida, it's explicitly legal to photograph 
the ballots. Should be everywhere.

FairVote is distorting the truth about those 
images. Yes, OpScan equipment captures images of 
ballots, but they apparently don't store those 
images, they process them into abstracted vote 
data, which is what SF calls "images." It means 
analyzed votes from a single ballot. And they 
processed out data considered irrelevant for 
election purposes, but very relevant for 
determining voter error rates by analyzing the exact form of errors.

Now, as to exit polls. It is obvious that exit 
polls get more complex with IRV, or any 
preferential ballot system, because more 
questions need to be asked. It's not enough, any 
more, to ask "who did you vote for?" Exit polls 
are important as a check on official results. 
Properly done, they can detect certain kinds of 
fraud, then leading, hopefully, to more detailed 
examination of the ballots or election processes. 
Unfortunately, what we have seen, with heavy 
dependence on automated equipment, is high 
reluctance to investigate election fraud, which 
can be pretty difficult with some voting 
equipment. The paper ballot systems that San 
Francisco is using, though, are much better than 
the worst. If someone actually does audit the 
results. And that gets more complicated with IRV. 
More to the point, if errors are found, what is 
done with that? Errors in counting IRV ripple 
through the rounds. An error in counting the 
first round can require the entire election to be 
recounted, i.e,. *all the precincts,* and *all 
the rounds.* Which was weeks of work, with 
election workers putting in 16-hour days, in San Francisco last year.

Simple, easy for election officials? Yeah, right.

Continued with:
Dopp: 7. “Difficult and time-consuming to manually count
”